


I belong with you, you belong with me (you're my sweetheart)

by CourtneyCourtney



Category: Bob's Burgers (Cartoon)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Except When It Isn't, F/M, It's Called Fate and It's Great
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:16:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourtneyCourtney/pseuds/CourtneyCourtney
Summary: Five universes where Bob and Linda Belcher are soulmates, plus one where they chose to be together anyway





	I belong with you, you belong with me (you're my sweetheart)

**Author's Note:**

> I was sitting in my basement doing laundry, procrastinating on my other fics when this hit me like a lightning bolt. Purely self-indulgent; I just have a lot of feelings about them Belcher parents. <3
> 
> Spoilers (?) for Season 5's "Sliding Bob's" and Bob & Linda's [official meet-cute](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1jsX2dHIpw) from that episode.
> 
> If you want something from any of these drabbles tagged (be it for triggers or just ease of future searching), let me know. I didn't want to go overboard. Also, if anyone feels like spinning any of these threads into a longer yarn, just ask. I won’t bite.
> 
> Part Five was partially inspired by Lauren's fic "[feels like we've already waited too long](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2327621)" - check it out if you aren't averse to _The Big Bang Theory_ and/or crazy mixed-up soulmate AUs!
> 
> Title from The Lumineers' "Ho Hey"

_one_

 

It's fine, Linda supposes. A little boring, maybe, but their wordmarks matched, and that meant soulmates, so. Woo.

It's just so... not her, Linda thinks, and maybe that's selfish, or thinking too highly of herself or something. It was kind of a bummer, that these super special words she'd been waiting for her whole life, these first words she'd spoken to her soulmate and that bound them together forever, were something as ordinary as, "Oh, sorry! I'm sorry." That could be anybody saying that to Hugo. It just had to be her luck to step on the foot of the guy with the most generic soulwords ever, not that hers were any better. "Oh my god!" could be anyone's reaction to meeting her wonderful, gorgeous self.

But they matched, so. Here she is, ring on her finger, having a cocktail with Ginger under the guise of discussing bridesmaid dresses.

"So I said, 'That's not how you throw a shrimp,'" Linda crows, winding up to illustrate her point. "' _This_ is how you throw a shrimp!'"

Her hand makes contact with something solid but squishy, and a rather masculine "ow!" accompanies her smack. Linda pulls her hand back, but it's snagged on something, pulling the poor schmuck she seems to have hit along with it.

The man groans some more as Linda goes to face him, grunting a rather annoyed, "Oh my god" at the end of his bellyaching. The words on Linda's right arm tingle for the first time in ages.

"Hey," she snaps anyway, because a ring is a ring and she's never been the best at taming her temper once she got going. "You got a lot of nerve grabbing girls’ diamond rings with your... thick, luxurious, Tom Selleckian mustache. Hi." Oh. Well. She's never been great at taming anything about herself once she gets going. Hello, gorgeous mustacheeyeslipsface.

"I..." Whatever the guy was about to say gets cut off by a chuckle. Linda likes the sound of it. "Oh my god. _Oh my god_."

"What, what is it?" That phrase is really a thing with this guy. The words on Linda's arm feel all sparkly again.

The guy cracks up. "It's just... so long," he explains. "I can't believe you actually said all of that." He waves his right arm away from where it's been resting against his side. Linda catches black lines running up and down and up some more along the inside. She squints in the dim bar light, trying to read it better, but her head's spinning a little, heart hammering out of her chest. Now _that's_ more like it.

"Should we get some scissors?" the man asks from where Linda still has him reeled in.

Linda grins back up at him - her _real_ soulmate. "What's the rush?

 

 

_two_

 

Bob wakes up to her singing Wham. Probably. He thinks it's supposed to be "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," but she's making up her own lyrics. They fit pretty well with the real parts, though.

Bob always wakes up with a song in his head. Some days, it's annoying, overly loud. Some days it makes him wrap his extra pillow across his face and burrow under the blankets. Most of the time, though, it's nice. It's nice to hear her and know someone's out there living their best life. She was in a band for a while, he thinks. That was fun.

It gets him out of bed, a lot of days. Just knowing that she's out there and that someday he's going to meet her.

He wonders what she hears. While his soulmate is a waterfall, an unending, unrelenting torrent of music, Bob's more like a lake. Or a puddle. A puddle that occasionally hums under his breath at the grill. He wonders if she hears when he's drunk and alone and singing along to Donna Summer or Cyndi Lauper. She probably has.

(... He kind of hopes she has. So she at least knows he's here, and vaguely what he sounds like.)

There's something about Linda that draws him in right away when they meet. A kind of chemistry Bob didn't know could be felt, a kind of rightness with the universe even though they're shooting the breeze at a bar and Linda's friend keeps eyeing him warily.

He doesn't think about his soulmate once all night, not until he's crawling into bed at 2:32 AM and she starts singing "I Could Have Danced All Night." He wonders if he's only trying to make himself feel better by imagining whoever she is sounds a lot like Linda.

 

(He feels a lot better next weekend, when he figures out whoever she is sounds _exactly_ like Linda. The passionate kiss he gets when Linda flings herself into the passenger's seat of his car, interrupting his impromptu "Born to Run" sing-along while waiting to pick her up for their first date, tells him all is right where it should be.)

 

 

_three_

 

"Ooo, ow, ow! It's coming in, it's coming in!"

"Let me see, let me see," Gayle hisses, practically pushing Linda back into the bathtub. Their parents are sleeping down the hall, and Linda knows they should be, too. It was impossible, though. Linda could barely shut her eyes from excitement. The second hand just brushed past midnight; she was officially sixteen now and she was getting her freakin' soulmate tattoo, she just knew it.

Linda swats Gayle back. "Ow, give me space." Her sister goes back to sitting on the closed toilet, pouting. She's just jealous she has to wait another year, Linda knows. She glances back down at her right wrist, inky black lines shifting into something solid. "Ooo, it tickles."

Gayle twists her head to be looking at a different angle without moving the rest of her body. "So, what is it?"

"I don't know, it's not done yet," Linda tells her, vibrating with excitement. "It's coming, coming... it's... huh."

She flips her wrist, then turns it back over. Ta-da. "It's a hamburger."

"A _what_?" Gayle crows, causing Linda to shush at her. Linda gets up from where she'd been sitting on the edge of the tub to stand over her sister.

"Look, there's a bun," Linda explains, showing Gayle the mark, tracing the outline of each part. "And this bottom part looks like a patty. There's... cheese and lettuce and stuff. Huh."

"Huh," Gayle parrots back. She squints. "I really don't see what else it could be."

"Of course not, because I'm right," says Linda, suddenly defensive.

Gayle drums her fingers on her knees. "Huh. I mean, it's not very romantic, but at least you can stop pretending to be a vegetarian to impress Mark Ericksburg."

"True," Linda agrees, still tracing her tattoo. The more she looks at it, the fonder she feels. "I don't know, I think it's cute. Little burger boy out there waiting for me."

It gives Linda a mission over the years, leads her to stick her head in every Mom-and-Pop-style restaurant she passes just to say hi and maybe sneak a peek at whoever's on the grill. Once she's inside, though, it always smells good, and it maybe doesn't hurt to grab a bite and see if there's anyone else worth meeting. Good thing she never gets sick of burgers, because she's gonna find him.

It's how she meets Hugo, hands brushing over a napkin holder between them on the counter. That's probably what her soulmark means then, Linda figures. Hugo's into food, right? Like, for a living or for fun maybe? She isn't sure, she wasn't really paying attention when he was talking about his interests. He probably isn't even that passionate about food and the mark was to get Linda in the right place at the right time. Hugo has a turtle-shaped soulmark, and Linda likes turtles even if they aren't her Number One Passion in life, so that checks out, right?

So what if she finds she has way more in common with a Tom Selleck-type barfly who has a smattering of music notes on his wrist?

"I'm, uh," Handsome Face is saying, picking at the edge of his beer's label. "Well I'm working on starting my own restaurant. Looking at locations to rent around town."

"Oooh, exciting!" crows Linda, feeling a twinge of guilt for being more invested in this stranger's idea than her own fiancé's life. "What kind of restaurant? Italian? Mexican? 1950s-Americana?"

"No," the guy replies, "or, well. Maybe, kind of. It's, uh, burgers, mostly."

"Mostly?" asks Ginger, eyebrow raised.

"I mean, there can be other types of sandwiches," says the man. "Sometimes. I can _make_ other sandwiches, it's just that burgers - "

"It's you!" Linda shouts, loud enough that people at the bar turn to stare. She can't stop shaking.

"What?" says the guy.

"It's you, you're burger boy!" Linda thrusts her wrist into his face.

"Linda," Ginger says, a frown starting to cross her face.

Burger Boy's eyebrows rise all the way up his forehead. "Oh my god," he says. "Are you sure? I mean..." His gaze darts to her left hand and rock she'd been flaunting earlier. "How do you know?"

"I don't know," Linda replies, suddenly self-conscious. "We clicked, and now you're talking about burgers... Have you ever met anyone you just connected with like this before?"

Ginger takes a drink, then points across the table at the guy's wrist. "I'm sure you've had lots of people assume you're their soulmate," she points out rather nicely for as much as Linda wants her to shut her yap. "I mean, who doesn't like music?"

The guy looks down at his soulmark, lost in thought. "I don't know," he starts. "I mean, lots of people like music, but no one I've dated has ever seemed _that_ passionate about it, like - "

"What?" Linda blurts before she can stop herself. "That's crazy! Who doesn't just wanna _burst into song_?" She sings the last few words to emphasize her point. "Like all the time, you know? Like a musical. Why _isn't_ life more like a musical?"

The guy looks at her for a long, silent minute before picking his beer back up, a smile creeping onto his face. "Okay, you _might_ be onto something."

 

 

_four_

 

"Hey," the beautiful, dark-haired woman is saying, "you got a lot of nerve grabbing girls’ diamond rings with your... thick, luxurious, Tom Selleckian mustache. Hi."

"Hi," Bob says back. He sways a little. She's very obviously ogling him, and his face, and not his face, but Bob only has eyes for the cut forming above her lip. "Um. Should we get some scissors?"

"What's the rush?" she asks seductively. It's a small cut; she hasn't even noticed it yet, but there's... blood. Oh god. Bob wobbles some more.

The smirk drops off the lady's face. A small trickle of blood runs down her lip. "Hey, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Bob lies. "I'm, oh my God. I'm... going down."

 

He comes to a few minutes later on the floor of the bar. The dirty, dirty floor of the bar. There's muddy popcorn and a used Band-Aid in his field of vision. No blood, though, so that's a plus.

"Oh good, you're awake," says a female voice. "Everybody back up, back up!"

"Lin, they're already giving him space," says a different, quieter female voice.

"Oh, right," says the first woman.

Bob sits up, slowly. There's a pressure on his forehead, but it's freezing cold. Out of his left eye, he sees the pretty brunette from before kneeling beside him. Her friend is on her right, holding a bag of ice over the first woman's right eye, and Bob realizes the brunette is doing the same but to him.

"What happened?" Bob groans.

The brunette shoves her large hand in his face. "How many fingers am I holding up?

"Four," says Bob. "But seriously. What..."

The woman tsks, but she pulls her hand away. "You passed out and cracked your head on our table on the way down. How much have you had to drink, mister?"

"Not that mu- I mean, many, too many," Bob backtracks, deciding it's less humiliating for her to know he's scared of blood. "Sorry I... hit you too?"

"Oh no," says the lady, finally taking the bag of ice from her friend to hold against her forehead herself. Her eyes never leave Bob's, though. "I mean, you might as well have, but you didn't." She leans in close again. "I felt it!"

"What do you mean, you... oh... my god." Bob looks at her hand then, really looks. She's got a bunch of minor cuts that he knows, that he recognizes. A line on her thumb from last Friday when he nicked himself dicing onions. A bruise under her index finger's nail from when he shut his hand in the fridge door yesterday. Little scabs on all four knuckles from when he got distracted while grating cheese. "Oh my god." He looks back up at her smiling face. "You're... are you the reason my butt was, like, black-and-blue for a solid month last winter?"

"Yeah!" the woman laughs, fortunately not as embarrassed as Bob by his own stupid question. "Ugh, you wouldn't believe the week I was having then. My sister's cat scratched up my favorite shirt, and Ma wouldn't stop harping on me for not visiting more often, and then slipping in the driveway... Come on." She takes the pack of ice off Bob's right eye, then moves her left arm under his right side. "Let's get you up and we can talk."

 

 

_five_

 

"Whew!" Linda shoves her purse onto one of the empty chairs at the table Ginger had grabbed for them. "Sorry I'm late, traffic was a bear!"

"I thought you were walking here," Ginger replies.

"Yeah," says Linda, sliding a coaster under her Long Island. "But I decided to take a shortcut and wound up walking through some streets. Did you know that taxi driver with the really orange arm hair can speak French? Or swear in it, anyway. I think it was French."

Ginger's frowns at Linda, setting her drink down to stare directly at Linda's engagement ring. "Did you snag it on something?"

Linda blinks up at her friend. "Huh?"

Ginger reaches across the table to take Linda's hand. Linda sees it, too, the thin red thread caught between the diamond and its setting.

"Huh," Linda says again. "I must have."

Ginger sighs and makes this face that Linda knows means she's gonna hate what her friend says next.

"I can't believe you of all people are settling," says Ginger, frowning down at her glass.

"I'm not!" Linda snaps. "Shut up and drink your mojito." So what if Hugo doesn't do anything special for her? So what if she already sees in perfect color and she doesn't hear any voices in her head except her own? So what if she doesn't have a map or magic arrows or any tattoos or piercings or scars that shouldn't be there? Not everyone is so lucky. Ginger doesn't have room to judge; she'd been one of those with a timer embedded in her wrist that counted down until the exact second she met Tony. It had been a cakewalk for her.

Maybe she has one of the weird soulmate triggers, Linda thinks. Maybe it's one that doesn't kick in until you meet, or kiss, or do... something she hasn't done yet with Hugo. Anything goes in this bizarrely random universe.

Maybe she kind of is settling, Linda thinks. She's just... tired of waiting around for something to happen that might not ever happen. Hugo is _here_ , and he's nice. Her parents like him, he's a good kisser. Really, what else can she ask for in a man? Some ambition would be nice, but other than that she's... content. She guesses.

Besides, no pressure from no soulmate thingy has just made Linda really great at living in the moment. What does she have to worry about? Nothing, that's what. She's so good at focusing on what's now, not like Ginger, whose eyes keep flicking to Linda's ring. Jeez, give a girl some booze and she's suddenly distracted by shiny objects, like a seagull or some fish.

"So I said, 'That's not how you throw a shrimp,'" Linda crows, winding up to really bring the story home. "' _This_ is how you throw a shrimp!'"

Her hand whacks into a bristly face, a rather manly "ow!" alerting her that she made contact. Linda tries to pull her hand back in, but the man she hit comes along with it, facial hair caught on her rock.

"Ow, ow, ow, oh my god," the sap groans as Linda turns to face him.

"Hey," she starts, "you got a lot of nerve grabbing girls’ diamond rings with your... thick, luxurious, Tom Selleckian mustache. Hi." It really is a beautiful mustache. Linda could look at it and maybe the rest of his face all day. Her eyes land on the right side of his face, where there's a weird gray splotch. It's almost kinda shaped like a handprint, she thinks.

"Hi," says the man, sounding a lot calmer than a second ago. "My eyes are up here." He glances at Ginger. "Should we get some scissors?"

"What's the rush?" Linda asks, still taking in the view.

"I mean." The shifts his weight between feet. "I think... I mean this looks like kind of a problem for you. I mean, there's already some other thread or something stuck in the ring too? Plus, I mean. Me. I'm stuck here too."

Ginger finishes off her drink, then stands up. "I'll be right back with those scissors," she promises before she's heading up to the bar.

Linda looks the guy up and down a few more times before breaking the silence. "So," she says, "did you get slapped or something?"

"I... what?" The man frowns, thick eyebrows knitting together for a second before raising again. "Oh, you mean..." He gestures at his cheek with his free hand.

"Yeah," says Linda.

"No," the guy replies. "It's... embarrassing."

"Why, what is it? Tell me."

"No, it's - " The man chuckles a little, maybe like he's nervous.

"Tell me," Linda insists.

"It's where my soulmate is supposed to touch me for the first time," Barfly explains, looking everywhere except at Linda.

"Ah," says Linda. "Going right for the face. I like their style."

The man shrugs. "It's a little... big."

"It's not so bad," Linda retorts. Her hand twitches. She feels self-conscious and she has no idea why. Or well. Some idea, but it's stupid. It's stupid, but she feels like she has to do it, just compare the size of her hand to the print on this guy's face. She has to try.

Linda slips her left hand free of her engagement ring and carefully lines her hand up to the print on the side of his right cheek. She almost laughs at the sight of her engagement ring still caught in his mustache, but she doesn't. This feels serious somehow.

Her palm meets his cheek, and the man gasps. He doesn't pull back, though. If anything, he leans into Linda's touch.

"Did you feel something?" Linda asks, taking her hand away slowly. She gasps when she looks back at the man's cheek. The print isn't gray anymore. It's... it's changing, Linda thinks. It's not any one color yet, there's bits of every color to it. "Oh my god, it's beautiful!"

"Is it?" the man asks. His gaze drops to her hand. "Um." He starts to frown again. "Are you bleeding or did that thread get longer... and somehow magically get unstuck from your ring from earlier?"

With a start, Linda lowers her hand. Sure enough, the red thread is there, not on her ring. It looks like the thread winds around her finger, and it's a lot longer now... well, not terribly long. Linda follows its path with her eyes, traces the slight droop it makes between their bodies to where it connects to this man's left hand, clenched tightly around his bottle of beer.

"Oh yeah," is all Linda finds she can say.

"I'm, uh," says the man after a long minute. "I'm Bob."

"Linda."

 

 

_******_

 

Bob can't sleep. It's raining outside, dark even though it's six in the morning. He'd usually be starting the day now, but the kids have the day off school and Linda had convinced him to keep the restaurant closed.

("It's Labor Day, it's a holiday!" she had crowed last week, after a lunch rush Bob remembers well.

("I know," he had snapped. "The weekend that always makes or breaks us."

("Right," Lin had said, waving off his annoyance. "But after we make it through that, we deserve a little R&R, a little putting our feet up."

(Bob sighed. "We can't afford to."

("Well we're _gonna_ afford to," Linda argued. "This time. Because it's a very, _very_ special day," she had added, leaning across the counter to get in his face.

("Because the kids don't have school?" he asked.

(Linda's smile had turned upside down pretty darn fast. "No, Bob," she'd said, but Mike had come in with their mail then and she'd left it at that.)

Regardless, Bob can’t sleep, so he gets up. He pads around the bedroom to the closet. Should he grab a sweatshirt? Seems like it might be cold today, definitely damp. Bob stares into the dark closet, letting his eyes adjust before sighing. He shuts the door without getting anything out.

His eye catches on The Picture. It’s one of his favorites, for obvious reasons. He kind of looks… well, not like crap. Better than he looks now. And he’s looking at Linda with everything good and great in him. But he doesn’t photograph super well, and he’d been weirdly exhausted, like the rush of getting to city hall and signing the papers had worn off and he’d realized exactly what him and Lin had just done.

Still. Lin looks wonderful as always, her excitement crackling off the glossy paper and through the glass. Bob’s pretty sure she never sat down or closed her eyes that entire day.

Bob smiles at the memory. God, how long ago was it? They couldn’t have been that young, but it must have been…

“Oh my god,” Bob whispers. Today is the third, isn’t it? The square root of nine is three, or something stupid like that. Wait, no. Nine is divisible by three, and Bob _hates_ that he hears it in Hugo Habercore’s annoying voice.

It’s weird, how it hits him then. Bob looks to his right, at Linda still fast asleep in their bed. He hadn’t known it back then, but there was a time when Linda definitively chose him. There was a time when she'd had to make a decision, and she chose to give back a ring to her fiancé who she'd known for god knows how long. Bob could have ended up with nothing, and he never even thought about it.

Bob shivers. Yep, there's definitely a draft in the air today, he decides. And maybe a touch of the flu if that swooping in the pit of his stomach is anything to go by.

He looks back at their bed. Lin's sleeping on her back, but she's still snoring. Just a little. In a cute way.

Bob pads back to his side of the bed and sits down. He takes a minute to watch the steady rise and fall of his wife's chest, a minute to calm back down. She chose him. This crazy, wonderful woman chose _him_. How could everything _not_ be right where it's supposed to be?

Bob slides back under the sheet, pulls the covers and blanket up over both of them. He slides just a little bit closer to Linda, then shuts his eyes.

 


End file.
